1591 1592 1593 1594 1595 1596 1597 1598 1599 1600
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Spain's Felipe II sends a second armada against England in retaliation for last year's burning of Cádiz (see 1588; triple alliance, 1596). A storm scatters the Spanish ships once again.
Irish rebel Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, gains support from the baron of Dungannon and is joined by Hugh Roe O'Donnell, now 26, in petitioning Felipe II for aid in obtaining religious and political liberty from the English (see 1596; 1598).
Elizabeth makes her court favorite Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, the earl marshal of England while continuing to harbor suspicions that he may be overambitious (see 1596). He embarks for the Azores with Sir Walter Raleigh and Charles Blount, 8th Lord Mountjoy, to capture the Spanish treasure fleet, but the venture will fail (see Ireland, 1598).
Portuguese emissaries conclude the Convention of Malvana with the chiefs of Ceylon, who swear allegiance to Felipe I and are assured that their laws and customs will not be violated. The purpose of the convention is to give some semblance of legality to Portugal's control of the island.
Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin is falsely accused of disloyalty and demoted to the rank of common soldier (see 1593; but see also1598).
Kyoto's Ear Mound (Mimizuka) is dedicated September 28. In addition to the porcelains and metal printing type that samurai warriors have brought back from Korea, they have returned with barrels containing ears and noses hacked from the corpses of men they have slain in the ongoing war that has cost both sides hundreds of thousands of casualties (see 1593). Japanese daimyo have displayed the ears and noses before burying them, letting them serve as a warning not to challenge authority. The former Japanese shōgun Yoshiaki Ashikaga dies at Osaka October 19 at age 59.
A Muscovite ukase (edict) requires that runaway serfs be seized and returned to their masters (see 1592).
Clara Geissler, 69, of Geinhausen is arrested on suspicion of witchcraft, tortured until she "confesses" whatever her inquisitors demand, names 20 other women who have been with her at her alleged sabbats, but recants immediately after the instruments of torture are removed. The women she has fingered are thereupon arrested, they too are tortured, and when one of them "confesses" Geissler is tortured again, recants again, and is subjected to another round of torture, during which she dies.
Missionary-explorer José de Anchieta dies at Revitaba, Brazil, June 9 at age 63, having helped to found São Paulo in 1554 and gone on to become revered for his alleged "miracles."
Navigator Willem Barents dies in the Arctic June 20 at age 47 (approximate), ending his effort to find a Northwest Passage. He and his party abandoned their icebound ship earlier in the month, having rounded Novaya Zemlya and spent the winter in a driftwood hut on the island, the first Europeans to have survived an Arctic winter. Led by his Dutch captain Jacob van Heemskerck, 30, the group has embarked in two open boats, most of the crew reaches safety, and van Heemskerck will be promoted next year to vice admiral.
The Mughal emperor Akbar the Great orders that Indian peasants pay him one-third of the gross produce their fields are supposed to yield as determined by a detailed survey of the country's agricultural resources.
Galileo Galilei invents the sector (see 1592). His draftsman's compass will, with refinements, serve for centuries as a calculating device capable of solving many algebraic problems mechanically (see telescope, 1608; Babbage, 1833).
Alchemia by Halle-born German alchemist Andreas Libavius (Libau), 37, summarizes the medieval achievements of alchemy and what is known about chemistry. Libavius will be credited with being the first to describe hydrochloric acid and the preparation of aqua regia (royal water), a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids.
Ergotism is caused by eating spurred rye, concludes the faculty of medicine at Marbourg, France (rye infected with ergot fungus appears to have spurred grain heads) (see 1595; 1674).
Hideyoshi Toyotomi crucifies three Jesuits, six Franciscans, and 17 Japanese converts February 5 at Nagasaki. He orders all remaining missionaries to leave the country, but when most defy his order and remain, he backs off lest he drive away Portuguese traders, especially now that direct trade with China has ceased.
Nonfiction: Essays by English barrister-scientist Francis Bacon, 36, whose father, Sir Nicholas, died early in 1579. In "Of Studies," Bacon writes, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."
Theater: King Henry IV, Part I, by William Shakespeare, whose comic figure Falstaff says, "The better part of valour is discretion, in which better part I have saved my life" (V, iv).
Opera: Dafne at carnival time in Florence's Palazzo Corsi, with music by Italian composer Jacopo Peri, 36, who pioneers use of recitative in a reconstruction of musical forms used by the ancient Greeks in their tragedies; melodramatic libretto by Florentine poet Ottavio Rinuccini, 35.
Iceland's Mount Hekla volcano erupts as it did in 1154 (see 1836).
The Herball, or general histoire of plantes by English botanist John Gerard, 52, is largely a poor and thinly disguised translation of the 1554 Cruydeboek by Rembert Dodoens with most of its 1,800 illustrations lifted from a German work by Jacob Theodore of Bergzabern. Superintendent of the gardens of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley and lord high treasurer of England, Gerard describes potatoes, which he has received directly from Virginia, mistakenly calling them "Batata virginian sive Virginianorum, et Pappus, Potatoes of Virginia." The only potato common in England, however, is the batata, or sweet potato. Gerard says about maize, "Turky wheate doth nourisheth far lesse than either Wheate, Rie, Barly or Otes . . . The barbarous Indians, which know no better, are constrained to make a vertue of necessitie, and thinke it a good food; whereas we may easily judge that it nourisheth but little, and is of hard and euill digestion, a more convenient food for swine than for man." Gerard finds tomato plants to be "of a ranke and stinking savour" (see 1596) but admires the fruit as an ornamental.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi orders his people not to eat meat in a move designed to crack down on Christian conversions and resist other Western influence (see 1551).
Travels by Dutch navigator Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, 34, appears in translation with the first English-language mention of tea. Van Linschoten served in Goa, India, as secretary to the archbishop there from 1583 to 1589, sailed with the Dutch navigator Willem Barents in search of a Northeast Passage to the Orient 3 years ago, and tried again with Barents 2 years ago in a fleet of seven vessels, only to find the Kara Sea frozen over. He calls the beverage "chaa" (see 1609; coffee, 1582; coffee, 1601).
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